To · Talk · of · Many · Things · ...

RIP

Tosha, my 7 year old (I think) Toshiba laptop died last night. Again. The hard drive began whining, then the errors commenced. Finally, the operating system gave up. The laptop was in semi-retirement anyway; I'd set it aside in favor of a Asus netbook. Lately, I've had intermittent power plug connection problems again, so Tosha wasn't very portable. Its graphics chipset wasn't compatible with the newer versions of Ubuntu, so I only used it with XP to view Instant-Play Netflix movies on our upstairs television. Tosha was our only XP bootable computer with a video output. Backup? Of course. Remember, I'm not stupid.

The laptop was on its third battery and had survived three power plug fixes, one touch pad replacement, one memory upgrade and one false alarm when an internal paper sticker came loose and got caught in the fan. I've had it completely apart twice; the first power plug fix was done on an extended warranty. I'm gonna miss it.

Oh, wait. I think I have another laptop hard drive around somewhere. It might work. I could install the Ubuntu Linux derivative, SmashBang Linux, that works with Tosha's chipset. I recently used SmashBang Linux on an old Celeron box with the same graphics chipset. The box makes a good home mp3 music player.